What Are You Reading, Michael Specter?

Most people prepare for travels by reading about their destination; it always seemed an odd approach to me. I find it much easier and more pleasant to focus with the sights and smells of a place rattling around in my mind. So having just returned from India, my weekend reading is fairly clear: first, Aubrey Menen’s version of the Ramayana, which was first published in 1954. The original Ramayana, attributed to Valmiki, is an epic poem in Sanskrit with origins around 1,000 B.C. It is, among other things, the story of Prince Rama, exiled from his father’s kingdom as a result of the perfidious behavior of one of the king’s wives. That’s just for starters. Menen’s version is a light gloss—beautifully written, frequently hilarious and maybe even true. (“King Dasa-ratha, Rama’s father, was loved by all his subjects and he loved certain of them in return, especially if they were women.”) The other book is big and deep like the world it describes: William Dalrymple’s “The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty.” Let’s face it; the subject deserves an epic and this is it. It is one of those non-fiction books that feels like fiction. But then so does much of life in Delhi even today.

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